Month: December 2012

Disclosure: I sell a couple books that teach programming to kids (and are free to download). I don't personally view them as being in competition with Hackety Hack, but someone else might.

Hackety Hack was a project originally started by _why the lucky stiff to teach kids programming in Ruby. It often comes up in "I want to teach my kid programming" forum threads. So I downloaded Hackety Hack and decided to give it a try.

I found Hackety Hack to be frustrating and was very unimpressed with it, and do not recommend it as a way to teach programming to a beginner.

I've created Python & Pygame script that lets you walk around the overworld map of the original Legend of Zelda game on the 8-bit Nintendo. There are no monsters or levels or items; it is simply a walking tour. The Link walking sprite animation is implemented by my Pyganim module.

More importantly, this program does provide the raw map data the entire world map (something I haven't been able to find on the web.) Getting this from the Zelda ROM is actually a pain due to the tricks used to store the map info. The game doesn't store individual tiles and their XY location, but rather have one of three color schemes for the border and a color scheme for the center tiles. Even then, the game only stores columns of tiles, and then each room references which columns it uses. (You can notice the same columns being used in different rooms, even though their color scheme may change.)

These tricks aren't really needed with today's computers for a game as simple as Zelda, so I've compiled the tile map data for each individual location on the map. Here's the world map data file (it is also included in the main download below.)